In 2020, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 abbreviated as SARS-CoV-2, an extremely dangerous and previously unknown virus, wreaked havoc across the globe, killing more than 4.5 million people and leaving life long complications among many. It was declared a pandemic by WHO on March 11, 2020[1]}. COVID-19 is a disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Coronavirus's first case was found in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The RT-PCR (Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction) test used to test the evidence for this virus is not 100% reliable as it is known to give false-negative and false-positive results. Furthermore, it takes at least 6-8 hours to give the results, which is not helpful as this virus spreads rapidly through the air. In comparison to RT-PCR, detection via CT scans is more reliable, useful, and quicker technology for the classification of COVID-19. Recently, computer vision and image processing has led to extraordinary developments with the advancement of deep learning and especially the development of convolutional neural networks (CNN). The AI-based computer-aided system can speed up the diagnostic process and identify details imperceptible to the human eye.
Several studies have been done in this domain. Meng Li[2]} reviewed the chest CT features of COVID-19 patients and analyzed the role of Chest CT. Dai et al.[3]} explained the findings from lung CT scans of some patients that were admitted in The Second People's Hospital of Shenzhen for treatment of COVID-19. Fang et al.[4]} found that the chest CT scans demonstrated a higher sensitivity of 97% and was therefore a better way of screening and monitoring by radiologists. Ai et al.[5]} studied the correlation of Chest CT and RT-PCR Testing for Coronavirus disease. Nuriel[6]} also constructed a CNN model based on MobileNetV2 to evaluate the ability of deep learning to detect COVID-19 from chest CT images. Yu et al.[7]} constructed a system based on UNet++ for identification of COVID-19 from CT images. Chand et al.[8]} compared AlexNet, Resnet, VGG for classification of COVID-19. Similarly research has been carried out for detecting COVID-19 from X-Ray images as well([9]} and [10]} are some examples).
